Since people are sharing their opinions on what needs the most work, I thought I'd share mine too. I agree with everyone else about School and Combat needing work. I think the key thing is that game just becomes too easy too quickly. Once you feel like you're on auto-pilot, the game and the scenarios start to lose their charm. It's too easy to become a super strong, mentally healthy, perfect A-student, filthy rich sex god/goddess. The game has all of these systems in place that are supposed to be oppressive (trauma, stress, pain, control), but 90% of the time they feel trivial or underutilised. There are too many simple and repeatable ways to lower trauma. Control can generally be fully repaired with a single consensual encounter. The use of these stats just don't reflect the world and the scenario to me. If you play the game in the most "standard" way, you're an orphan essentially being pimped out by an evil predator. Yet it's trivially easy to be completely mentally well-adjusted and physically healthy while you're repeatedly selling your body at the brothel to pay off Bailey. The only aspects of the game that present some challenge in this way are non-consensual encounters and soft-ending scenarios. But Physique is way too easy to level (even when I'm hardly trying to) which eventually trivialises most non-consensual encounters too. IMO, the game would be more fun and engaging if keeping your character sane, financially-stable, and physically healthy felt like more of a struggle. To achieve this I'd suggest the following:
- Make the school system more about trade-offs rather than being good at everything. If school was harder and quite frankly more of a grind, it would become more a question of "do I want my character to be really good at Maths, or really good at English, etc?" rather than all of the above. Or "my grades are finally decent, but my status is terrible. I'm going to need to let my grades drop for a while so that I can raise my status and stop getting bullied." If it wasn't so easy to be good at absolutely everything simultaneously, then it would introduce more strategy and thus more interactivity. Then, even with the inherent repetition of something like a school system, it would stay more engaging and feel more like an active mini-game with significant penalties and rewards. Which I feel like is what it was probably originally conceived as, because a lot of the mechanics are already sitting there waiting to be utilised, but they need dialing and tweaking. Because currently, I go to school and do the exact same thing every day. Study in the library before school (because there's not much else to do anyway), go to science class early for the bonus. Focus on the lesson twice and socialise once. Talk to Robin at lunch. Study more (again, there's not much else to do at lunch time). Go to History class early. Repeat.
- An attitude setting so that sex via prostitution doesn't lower stress/trauma and increase control, but instead increases stress/trauma and lowers control (but to a lesser degree than non-consensual encounters). Regadless of Promiscuity level. This would add way more challenge, and allow you to play as a character that resorts to sex-work out of desperation but feels bad about it. Which would quite frankly be appropriate given the scenario the MC is in. And it could lead the character to have to rely more on self-medicating (e.g. alcohol and/or anti-depressants from Dr Harper) to stay healthy. Currently, you can essentially "heal" yourself from a bad non-consensual encounter by going to the Brothel and whoring yourself. This might fit some people's roleplaying approach, but it doesn't really fit mine. Having an option to remove prostitution as one of the "positive" types of sexual encounter would also then put more of an important emphasis on sex with love interests, which would now play a more important role in repairing the MCs control and reducing stress/trauma.
- Something resembling a "wear and tear" system, where repeated sex acts (even consensual ones, but to a lesser degree than non-consensual ones) can cause significant pain. So that you actually have to pace yourself. This, combined with the suggestion above, turns prostitution into a high risk / high reward way of making money, rather than the relatively low risk / high reward thing that it currently is. So maybe a character that mostly relies on prostitution to make money has to take a couple days off and make significantly less money at the cafe instead, in order to let their body heal enough.
- Dial down some of the financial rewards, or introduce new money sinks, or both. For example, I now just ignore Avery every playthrough because going on dates with him is just too lucrative. Once you're financially set up and Bailey's payments are no longer a concern (even while supporting Robin too), that's when the boredom sets in. You feel like you've "won" the game. A game like this with the oppressive world/narrative/scenarios should never really feel like you're "safe" or you've "won", or if so, that victory should be really grueling and hard-earned.
Anyway, those are my opinions. I'd definitely like to see a focus on refining, expanding and rebalancing what's already there rather than adding new features for a while. It feels like lots of the foundations are there but certain elements are misfiring or being underutilised at the moment, at the expense of challenge and difficulty. And I'm of the mindset that challenge and difficulty are key here, because they require the player to make constant strategic micro-decisions, which increases interactivity and immersion. And in a text-game such as this with a lot of repetitive events, decision-making, interactivity and immersion are essential.
